Epistemology

What is epistemology?#

Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief.

Epistemology addresses the question: How do we know what we think we know?

There are many approaches to the study of certainty, so I will blithely ignore most of them and contrast two: Induction vs. Deduction.

Deductive reasoning#

Given a base set of general facts, we build up as high as we can to useful general conclusions.

Inductive reasoning#

Inductive reasoning is the opposite; we take specific real-world observations and generalize them to general truths. This is problematic in SO many ways, and we have known about the problem of induction for hundreds of years. Yet this is how most of us conduct our businesses, lives, and core belief systems.

Induction is insidiously persuasive#

You may laugh at someone taking a single anecdote and generalizing it to everybody. However, this is philosophically only slightly worse than taking a population survey and generalizing, which is again only slightly worse than looking outward and seeing what else exists and inferring that that is all that can exist (the proverbial frog in the well).

We do this every day#

We dress it up in statistics and numbers to make it feel more truthful. We call ourselves things like empirical or data driven. We look at someone’s resume for assessing capability to do a job— unobjectionable at first glance until you see how much people’s opinion changes when “A went to Harvard” or “B was the guy who took X from 10-100m in ARR.”

When hiring for a thing (say, a job in React), we overweight people who have done the thing (a previous job in React) over people who could do the thing (anyone with extensive experience in JavaScript/web dev). We keep up on news and trends, competitors, neighbors, peers, celebrities, friends, and family, and that represents our reality.

Comparison between induction and deduction#

Induction and deduction are not on equal footing. As a rule, induction data points are far more readily available, while deductive facts are far more timeless but costly to pin down. Only logicians, mathematicians, and theoretical physicists have the luxury of starting entirely from the basis of first principles.

Everyone else must make do with some axioms accepted on faith to have a hope of getting somewhere useful. The problem arises when we go too far and construct our entire worldview out of axioms and received, untested wisdom. Humans are GREAT at back-fitting/rationalizing from present data points but terrible at examining the basis of their beliefs.

“1500 years ago, everybody ‘knew’ that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody ‘knew’ that the earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you ‘knew’ that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll ‘know’ tomorrow.”

- Men in Black

Address your epistemology head-on#

Addressing your epistemology head-on is very important for decision-making because if you don’t know how you know what you know, then how do you have any faith in the decisions you make based on that knowledge?

Acknowledge epistemology#

Acknowledging epistemology is also important for building mental models because you can either fill your explanations with a bunch of incidental junk complexity with the redeeming quality of being real, or you can start from a bunch of irrefutable base facts and build up to something theoretically possible.